Canadian Refugees And Syrian Refugees

When I was homeless I was an internal refugee.  I felt that the city where I was born and raised, where I had worked, taken care of the vulnerable and paid taxes, had cruelly betrayed me.  I had to rely on the kindness of friends, family and strangers to stay alive.  The emotional distress I was under and the mental health complications from this ordeal made me pathetic, annoying and embarrassing, and eventually alienated from me family and many friends.  In a little under a year I did find housing in a shared apartment.  I was exhausted.  I was a wreck.

Three years later, as I was moving towards recovery there was a sudden explosion of homelessness in my province.  Our federal Liberal government, formerly an alleged friend to vulnerable Canadians, dismantled national housing strategies and other programs for the poor and vulnerable.  Nation-wide homelessness was already on the rise.  When a provincial Liberal government was elected here in British Columbia in 2001 they enacted particularly punishing legislation against the poor here.  Welfare and housing, already hard to get, became to many inaccessible.  Homelessness skyrocketed by nearly four hundred percent.  And to this day there are well-intentioned morons who still think that people come here from other parts of the country because of our mild climate and hey presto! More homeless people, when actually most of us were born here, raised here, or spent many productive years living in this part of the country working our butts off and paying taxes before the shit hit the fan.

It is estimated that there are approximately two hundred thousand homeless people living in Canada.  Last I heard the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa are doing absolute squat to address the situation.  Canada remains the only developed nation without a national housing strategy.  And now Amnesty International and the UN are tut-tutting us for not taking in one hundred thousand Syrian refugees.  I am not saying that the Syrian refugees are not deserving of our help and personally I would love to see them, all of them, and not just a paltry thirteen hundred (so far less than five hundred have arrived here) resettled in this country.

But please let us not ignore the sad and tragic irony we are living with already in this country: two hundred thousand homeless, internal refugees, home-grown refugees aka Canadian citizens are already living in this country and Ottawa is ignoring them.  This is twice the number of the Syrian refugees we have been asked to accept.  I am not suggesting that the Syrians be barred from entering this country till we have settled our own internal refugees in safe and permanent housing.  What I would like to say is that Stephen Harper and his cabinet badly need to pull their heads out of where the sun don't shine and have a good look at their spending priorities, and begin to pay more attention and even more dollars to establishing simultaneously housing and supports for Canadian refugees and Syrian refugees.

The money is there.  All they need to do is learn a few math skills.  And cultivate a generous and loving heart.